My Summer Vacation, Part 1
This is a long one folks. Inside: thoughts on Belle & Sebastian, Belly, Bell's, Big Adventure, and saying Bye-Bye to my Car
This summer was never going to be normal, whatever that means. For the past 20 years, I had started ramping up for fall semester in early August, but this year I didn’t have to. Summer ‘24 was planned as a runway toward sabbatical, during which I would be ostensibly putting a lot of ideas that have been simmering in my head for years into article and/or preliminary book form. And it’s worked out really well. I’ve more or less caught up on the accumulated and fairly vast literature (see “Book-Related” in the bullet points of this post).
I’ve done more traveling than usual too, which is very enjoyable but is also very time-consuming when you do it by car and camp instead of stay at hotels, which explains why I haven’t been writing about what I’ve been reading. Or listening to. Or anything. But that’s coming.
But first, I want to breeze through some stuff I’ve been doing for the past three and a half months. (If you’re reading this in your email, it’s gonna get cut off)
I celebrated the end of the semester and the beginning of summer with a tiny staycation in Detroit to see Belle and Sebastian, a band that has been near to my heart for 25 or so years, but who I hadn’t seen live until their If You’re Feeling Sinister set at Pitchfork Fest 2019. Festival crowd or not, it was a joyous set, how could it not be when thousands of people are singing along to some of the cagiest, catchiest sad-kid music ever made.
I saw them for a second time in Indianapolis a couple years ago and finally understood the full Belle and Sebastian concert experience: Stuart the energetic and funny raconteur who is eager, with Stevie Jackson his able sidekick, to discuss what they’ve done in your particular city during their visit. When I saw them in Indy, Jackson referenced David Soul’s 1977 UK #1 “Silver Lady,” because he remembered the line “the Indiana wind and rain cut through me.” That kind of amiable record-nerd shit. Which I love. In Detroit, they at one point projected a photo of themselves in front of Jack White’s Midtown record store/recording studio/temple-to-himself Third Man Records. A thorough humble charm offensive from these affable Scottish nerds. I love them.
They’ve apparently been inviting crowd members onstage to dance during “The Boy With The Arab Strap” for years now, and they did it in Detroit, and sure, fine, I guess? I come to see the band, I can look around myself and see crowd members anytime I want, and none of these people can even dance. Reverse interactivity, though, works well. During the breakdown of “Your Cover’s Blown,” Stuart somehow disappeared into the audience and appeared right behind me, which I didn’t know until everyone in the crowd turned around and looked at me (nightmare content). And then he kind of just squirmed his way back through the crowd and onto the stage eventually.
The next morning I sat at a Detroit coffee shop with headphones on and caught up on the suddenly explosive war between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. For a second, I wondered if Stuart Murdoch ever read the Clientele’s Alasdair MacLean licking shots at Belle and Sebastian in 2001. Probably not.
A week and a half later, I grabbed a rare sliver of Political Husband Jesse’s time and we scooted down to Kalamazoo to see The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis blow the roof off of Bell’s Eccentric Café (a venue that, not for nothing, is booking better music than any venue in the much larger city of Grand Rapids). The Andrew Rathbun Trio, led by the WMU jazz prof, opened (above). The headliners—comprising Fugazi’s rhythm section, multiply awarded saxophonist Lewis, and guitarist Anthony Pirog, played music exclusively from one of my favorite LPs of the year, which was certainly kind of them (below). Andy Cush compared the album to the fertile, ad-hoc NYC skronk factories that surrounded John Zorn and Sonny Sharrock in the 80s and 90s, and I’d add to that a soupçon of modernish instrumental hybrids like Budos Band, Nomo, and Khruangbin, and the recent slate of UK jazzy rhythm merchants orbiting Impulse!-signed Shabaka Hutchings.
Anyway: here’s a taste.
On May 16, I spun down to my hometown with my friends John, Emily and their toddler to see the home debut of Caitlin Clark, who you may have heard is a very talented basketball player. She however did not have a great first game—nor did her team, which was shellacked by the Liberty. The peak of Clark’s evening was her rousing introduction, which I captured via smartphone from our perch:
Blowout notwithstanding, it was great to see the Fieldhouse aroar for a team other than the 2014 Indiana Pacers, which was the last time I was there amid such collective anticipation for highly competitive professional basketball. Caitlin Clark is more than Indianapolis’ latest Reggie Miller, though, she’s far closer to the new Peyton Manning, the latter so unprecedentedly athletically successful in Indianapolis that they built a new stadium to meet the demand that he generated and which still surrounds the team that cut him when his neck stopped working right.
After Tamika Catchings retired in 2016, the Fever were terrible for years. But thanks to Clark accelerating the WNBA’s (and NBA’s) marketing machine to draw attention to the numerous other very good and fun players, everything feels big now, closer to the gargantuan spectacle of the NBA and NFL. As for the Fever, after their initial gauntlet of games against the league’s best teams, Clark, Kelsey Mitchell, Aliyah Boston, and NaLyssa Smith rallied them to a playoff 6-seed.
After that trip, I drove south to Franklin, Indiana, the home of Franklin College and WFCI, the radio station at which I started my fledgling media career in earnest in 1994, as a college senior and dues-paying member of Alternative Nation eager to blow people’s minds with Jawbox’s “Savory.” I was there not for the radio or the college, however, but to visit one of my best friends and her folks and their dog for a few days. I’m not giving away any details but the home is so historic it has its own Wikipedia page and, I’m told, ghosts. But the best part of the Franklin trip apart from the people was going with my friend, her parents, and what felt like a couple hundred other people to the historic Artcraft Theater to see Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, one of my favorite movies.
My Franklin friend and I have a deep connection through Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. As a child, my dad was obsessed with the original HBO special—one of the cheap thrills of being an early-adopter pay-cable family, along with Bachelor Party and Midnight Madness. Though there were a lot of jokes I didn’t get, I too fell in love with Pee-Wee’s manic enthusiasm for giant foil balls and talking chairs, such that by the time the TV series debuted, I was doing full-on impressions for my folks in the living room on Saturday afternoons. When we met junior year of college, my friend had the entire series on VHS sitting underneath the TV/VCR combo in her apartment living room. How were we not still going to be friends 25 years later?
The greatest thing about the Artcraft is that it’s deeply tied into the local Franklin community: before each classic film they screen, a couple hosts come out to the stage at the front of the auditorium to introduce the film and give away raffle prizes. I won a gift bag for being the person who drove furthest! 5.5 hours did it. My gift bag had a red bow tie, a rubber snake, and a t-shirt that makes it look like I did a tour of the Alamo’s basement when I wear it. I had to go up on the stage to accept my award, and while I was up there, I saw in the audience that some Bloomington friends had made the trip too: David, Mike, Aaron, Anna, Lewis & Addison, and others. All in all, a rejuvenating B-12 shot of Semi-Southern Indiana.
Oh yeah, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Still so amazingly good. Paul Reubens, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman codified a b-movie comic aesthetic that aligned tightly with the nascent-Gen-X fondness for ‘50s culture—shiny plastic appliances, ridiculous gadgetry, a whiff of seamy pulp trash—that Reubens delivered with precision timing (Pee-Wee’s snickers and occasional laugh bursts = Michael Jackson’s vocable hiccups) and perhaps most importantly, they all give a huge wink to the grown-ups that yes of course the whole thing’s a bit. NB: I think Pee-Wee’s deeply self-reflexive ending is every bit as good as when Blazing Saddles did a similarly meta sendoff a decade earlier (and definitely aligned with what David Letterman and Chris Elliott was doing at the same time).
After the edible hit and I was laughing harder than I did when I was 11 at the rescuing-snakes-from-the-fire gag, and Pee-Wee constantly looking at the camera during his big bellhop scene at the end, and the crowd populated with Modern Phone Teens was losing their shit too, I newly appreciated how much Pee-Wee’s manchild personality traits (impatience, bullheadedness, imaginativeness) and his delivery mechanisms (the honking laugh, the nasal tone, the jumping, the making inanimate objects talk) transcend generations. My dad (b. 1945) was obsessed, and now, in 2024, Pee-Wee reminds me of Tim Robinson.
Also, I got to spend some quality time with my mom, who is always working on multiple sewing projects at once, including this in-progress quilt:
Okay, where was I? Ah, right….Belly. On May 20, I participated in a screening and panel discussion of Hype Williams’ full-length directorial debut, co-sponsored by the Grand Rapids Film Society and the Grand Rapids Hip-Hop Coalition.
My take on the film hasn’t much changed since I first saw it on a dubbed VHS sometime in 2000: it’s far from a “great film,” in fact one might add it’s “borderline incomprehensible at parts” (like most music videos). If I were to sum up the aesthetic in one word, it would be “money.” In this interview with Jeff Mao, Williams is pretty evasive, but he explains it well: “It peaked in ’97…Like everything else, we all just took it too far. Everybody had too much access to everything. That’s what happened. So basically, the end of the ’90s was that. It was just this crazy celebration of everything going right.” Belly’s not going to win any Sight & Sound polls but man. It’s pretty to look at, especially a good copy like they screened at the Wealthy Theater. The slo-mo, blacklit club scene that opens the film, set to an a capella of Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life” (that Scoop Deville later sampled for Fat Joe’s best song) is worth savoring for the 2:45 until the beat (and the body) drops.
I got to say all three things I had planned for the (active!) post-screening discussion:
Contextualizing, with my co-panelists, where Hype and Belly fit in the broader ideological and aesthetic trends in hip hop and music video at the time. Williams came up in the heart of the emergent hip hop music video universe, shlepping gear on shoots for Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy videos in the late 1980s. He quickly moved on to shooting his own Wu-Tang and EPMD clips, but he peaked in the jiggy era (which I address toward the end of my book, Ｗн𝓘c𝐡 ᵐᵃⓀ𝔢𝕤 𝕒 ⓁⓄv€𝐥ч gƗ𝒇𝕥).
The underrated role of Williams’ stylist June Ambrose, whose genius it was to put Missy in a trashbag and who was responsible for the “shiny suit” era as much as Williams himself. Like many below-the-line (women) culture workers, Ambrose is worshipped in the industry, and still active in it, but strangely anonymous outside of it. This interview is a good primer.
I also got to shout out late-1990s Busta Rhymes, who along with Missy was Hype and June’s true muse, whose music required the sort of hyperreal, Afrofuturist visual treatment. My two favorite Busta/Hype collabs are (apart from “Feel So Good” and “California Love”) as good as he got with his garish fin-de-siecle Black pop-art maximalism: “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” and “Gimme Some More.”
Okay so about my car. A few days after Belly, while preparing for a trip to Madison, Wisconsin to see some new and old friends, my car pooped out after almost 18 years of service. It was a Scion XB (yes, this literal Black Box) that I bought because my then-partner was a painter and she painted HUGE canvases and we were tired of renting vans to transport said canvases between shows and galleries. It was also super inexpensive and got good gas mileage and was a Toyota. As a gentleman of size, I appreciated the insane amount of headroom; when I got back in after driving like, a two-door sedan, it felt like I was in a store-brand Range Rover.
I drove the shit out of that car. I drove it to Austin twice, to NYC and back twice, to North Carolina and back three times, to New Orleans, Memphis, Tampa, and when I taught in Utah for two years, the entire two-day journey from there to Indiana four times. I put almost 175,000 miles on that black box. I slept in the back of that car at rest stops. I drove it when I shouldn’t have been driving it. My brain wriggled me out of countless writing jams while I was zoning out on the hum of the highway. I [redacted] in that car. Never while driving, though.
Because it was a Toyota, I never had a lick of engine trouble. The Scion was, however, smashed into by other people numerous times and rebuilt, body part by body part, so many times that it could likely qualify as the Ship of Theseus. A kid ran a stop sign and I t-boned him in my former Bloomington neighborhood, about a week before I was supposed to drive the car to Utah because that’s where I was moving. I drove it to Utah with half a roll of duct tape holding the front together because the Geico guy said it was okay. It had this weirdly angled windshield that made it way more susceptible to rocks hitting it and leaving cracks in it. I had to replace that windshield 4 times; luckily it’s like $175 and I could probably do it myself with the right tools.
The last time it was hit was the second time it was hit by a drunk driver in front of my house (we lived on a one-way street around the corner from a small bar district). The first time, the person drove away (I kept a piece of the front bumper that broke off, though). The second time, the teen driver got wedged somehow into my car, and because he was underage was in a heap of shit, and I was required to write a letter to the judge about the turmoil I’d been through. I recommended leniency, because come on.
My car was smushed on the drivers’ side but still driveable, and because at that time it was 15 years old and probably worth about what the repairs would be, my insurance company basically, um…let me have my mom (also my insurance agent for the past 30 years) explain:
That was July 2021. The insurance company basically cashed out and sent me a check that covered the repairs at this little mom-and-pop place outside Grand Rapids. For the next three years, I drove a zombie car. For anyone who’s driven the same car for more than a decade, you understand how it felt like a material and emotional carapace, something I’d grown into over the past 15 years, three states, and one dog. I didn’t want to let it go, and didn’t really need to. I drove it to Tampa to see an old friend in 2022 and it was fine. Until suddenly, it wasn’t.
Loved this. Nothing beats the Belly opening.